Question for religious historians.

I can find no connection between John Humphrey Noyes who founded the utopian society "The Oneida Community" in 1848 in Oneida, New York, and Joseph Smith's "Church of Christ", later, "The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints", founded in Upstate New York.

Is there a connection other than the religious fervor happening in the "burnt-over" district: Communalism and the United Order; Free love and polygamy; judgment of members by the leadership. Or were these religiously connected notions free floating in society at the time.

Did similar ideas inspire each movement? Or might some members of the LDS church become connected to Noyes after Joseph Smith's death?

Just wondering.

I doubt there was any connection. 1848 is 18 years after JS was making noise in NY. Mormons were long gone by 1848. That was the year of the Seneca Falls Convention which started the US women’s movement that has so ruined life for Maca.

At least Oneida Community gave us silverware, and Amanda Colony gave us microwaves and refrigerators. All we got from the Mormons was nutcases, polygamy and MLMs.

> All we got from the Mormons
> was nutcases, polygamy and MLMs.


...machine guns, the 1911 .45, and television!!!

The more important point is that a lot of those ideas were percolating throughout the American frontier communities. There were people who prayed for forgiveness of sins and received personal visits from God (First Vision), groups that experimented with spiritual wifery (polygamy), and movements that tried various forms of communitarianism (United Order, which was neither Marxist nor communist).

There was very little in Mormonism that was truly unique.

Not to worry, just Wikipedia.

Spiritual wifery was taught and practiced in parts of Rhode Island and Massachusetts from the 1740s onward. The Cochranites practiced it in New Hampshire from 1818 at the very latest--and in that manifestation men were assigned to various wives and then sometimes reassigned, much as the early Mormons would reassign women to higher priesthood holders and as the FLDS still do.

Then came Noyes, who believed he could sin with impunity from 1836 (born again, doncha know) and hence was not bound by traditional morality. Soon he'd left his wife and was doing as he wanted. He established the Oneida Community in 1848--a mere four years after JS's demise--which also thought that polygamy meant, or should mean, a man having three or more wives. The Oneida group was based in upstate New York but had branches in Vermont, New Jersey, and Connecticut.

My point is simply that Mormon polygamy fit right in with the innovations along the American frontier. With restorationism, spiritual wifery was entertained, taught, and at intervals practiced, throughout states in which Mormonism arose for decades before the LDS church was organized and for decades after the Mormons left. That goes for the institutions of polygamy as well: assignment and reassignment of spouses, the ideal of three or more wives, etc.

Mormon polygamy only appears unique in hindsight, now that the many earlier and later movements have faded away. It was in fact routine for fringe cults in western New England and New York.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiritual_wifery